Hiroshima - Hardcover

In this new enlarged edition of his classic account of the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb, Hersey recounts his return to Japan, forty years later and his interviews with six people who were the focus of the earlier book

the story of six human beings who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. With what Bruce Bliven called "the simplicity of genius," John Hersey tells what these six -- a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest -- were doing at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city. Then he follows the course of their lives hour by hour, day by day.

The New Yorker of August 31, 1946, devoted all its space to this story. The immediate repercussions were vast: newspapers here and abroad reprinted it; during evening half-hours it was read over the network of the American Broadcasting Company; leading editorials were devoted to it in uncounted newspapers.

Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book John Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told. His account of